captainsblog (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
captainsblog) wrote2018-09-16 01:19 pm
captainsblog) wrote2018-09-16 01:19 pm
Wright and Wrongs
Great game I didn't go to at Fenway Pahk. The Mets got a shutout and a deep start from one of their best pitchers, and even scored eight runs for him. Yet some of the significance of that win was overshadowed by the other news leading up to it: David Wright, the team's captain and one of their longest-standing homegrown star players, announced on Thursday that he would be returning from a season-long rehab and starting his final game as a New York Met when the team returns for its final Citi Field homestand next week.
Met players don't have typical injuries- groin pulls, sore arms, torn ACLs. No, we've pretty much had to buy first year medical school textbooks to keep up with it all- from the brief loss of Friday night's pitcher (to hand, foot and mouth disease- a childhood ailment picked up during a school visit) to much longer and serious conditions afflicting our best hitter (calcified heels- out all year), our previous franchise pitcher (thoracic outlet syndrome- never recovered and traded in June) and, in Wright's case, spinal stenosis. It kept him off the field for much of 2015 (he came back and played often and well through the team's surprise run to the World Series), and after a 37-game try at it in 2016, he's been off the field. But not off the books- insurance has been paying his hefty captain's salary, and will likely continue to do so after his Final Game But It's Not Retirement.
That final start will be a week from this Saturday- Wright Night, it's now known. It will be a farewell and a memoir of a long and mostly frustrating career, all of it headquartered in Queens. Ticket prices for the otherwise meaningless game immediately went through the Wroof, from the usual six-dollar cheap seat availability to well over $100. But the final game the next day? Still six bucks and slightly above. I splurged for two $14 seats that will not require bringing one's own oxygen. If the ceremony is rained out, I may get to see it. Or they may bump all Sunday holders in favor of those who got scalped for the previous night, leaving me with two tickets usable any time in 2019- assuming they have enough uninjured players to field a team at that point. Or I could sell them if that Sunday game somehow becomes a big deal for some other reason.
The lateness of the announcement deprived David of the "farewell tour" that Jeter and Rivera got during their full final seasons as Yankees- but the Red Sox, at least, did their part. Before yesterday's game, Dustin Pedroia, one of their older players and a onetime teammate of the Captain, presented Wright with his uniform number from the legendary hand-operated Fenway scoreboard:
Yesterday's game itself got a little chippy, with leadoff batters getting hit by pitches, but the goodwill continued off the field, with 2,000 Met fans in attendance from the 7 Line group I went to Toronto with. They joined the hometown fans in a common chant of "Yankees suck!" (the Yankees also lost- to the Blue Jays:), and the owner of the team came to their section to thank them for coming. Not the Mets' owner (he's an asshat)- the Red Sox owner. Class all the way around.
----
While all that was going on, we were having adventures in cooking out back. Last week, both of our thermometers used for grilling shat their beds. The plastic one with the metal probe, used to check internal temp, melted when a certain dumb attorney left it in the meat too long over a heated grill; the metal one, used to measure the overall grill temperature externally, finally cracked into unusability after years of being virtually unreadable due to fogging. The former was an easy replacement at Wegmans, but the external thermometer proved a challenge. Neither our usual store nor our go-to hardware store had anything promising to stand up to grilling temps. So off to Amazon I went, and found what appeared to be the solution:
It measures from a stick-through sensor that Eleanor drilled a hole in the grilltop to accept. Then she decided to test it out with a new rack of ribs- and one of her friends from work was quickly added to the party.
Yesterday afternoon, after firing it up, the needle got up into the BBQ range, but then would go no higher even as the grill was clearly getting hotter. She resolved to extrapolate the temperature from some other factors, plus we at least still had the probe to ensure the ribs themselves were properly heated inside.
Until we didn't. That thermometer also stopped displaying anything- and now it was within two hours of scheduled arrival time. So I headed back to Wegmans to replace the probe, and found the only close thing they had to an oven thermometer to measure the external temp. Trouble was, once we got it out of the package, it turned out it had a rubbery back and would’ve incinerated. I then ran off to Ed Young’s Hardware- the TARDIS of all home products- just as they were closing.
Met players don't have typical injuries- groin pulls, sore arms, torn ACLs. No, we've pretty much had to buy first year medical school textbooks to keep up with it all- from the brief loss of Friday night's pitcher (to hand, foot and mouth disease- a childhood ailment picked up during a school visit) to much longer and serious conditions afflicting our best hitter (calcified heels- out all year), our previous franchise pitcher (thoracic outlet syndrome- never recovered and traded in June) and, in Wright's case, spinal stenosis. It kept him off the field for much of 2015 (he came back and played often and well through the team's surprise run to the World Series), and after a 37-game try at it in 2016, he's been off the field. But not off the books- insurance has been paying his hefty captain's salary, and will likely continue to do so after his Final Game But It's Not Retirement.
That final start will be a week from this Saturday- Wright Night, it's now known. It will be a farewell and a memoir of a long and mostly frustrating career, all of it headquartered in Queens. Ticket prices for the otherwise meaningless game immediately went through the Wroof, from the usual six-dollar cheap seat availability to well over $100. But the final game the next day? Still six bucks and slightly above. I splurged for two $14 seats that will not require bringing one's own oxygen. If the ceremony is rained out, I may get to see it. Or they may bump all Sunday holders in favor of those who got scalped for the previous night, leaving me with two tickets usable any time in 2019- assuming they have enough uninjured players to field a team at that point. Or I could sell them if that Sunday game somehow becomes a big deal for some other reason.
The lateness of the announcement deprived David of the "farewell tour" that Jeter and Rivera got during their full final seasons as Yankees- but the Red Sox, at least, did their part. Before yesterday's game, Dustin Pedroia, one of their older players and a onetime teammate of the Captain, presented Wright with his uniform number from the legendary hand-operated Fenway scoreboard:
Yesterday's game itself got a little chippy, with leadoff batters getting hit by pitches, but the goodwill continued off the field, with 2,000 Met fans in attendance from the 7 Line group I went to Toronto with. They joined the hometown fans in a common chant of "Yankees suck!" (the Yankees also lost- to the Blue Jays:), and the owner of the team came to their section to thank them for coming. Not the Mets' owner (he's an asshat)- the Red Sox owner. Class all the way around.
----
While all that was going on, we were having adventures in cooking out back. Last week, both of our thermometers used for grilling shat their beds. The plastic one with the metal probe, used to check internal temp, melted when a certain dumb attorney left it in the meat too long over a heated grill; the metal one, used to measure the overall grill temperature externally, finally cracked into unusability after years of being virtually unreadable due to fogging. The former was an easy replacement at Wegmans, but the external thermometer proved a challenge. Neither our usual store nor our go-to hardware store had anything promising to stand up to grilling temps. So off to Amazon I went, and found what appeared to be the solution:
It measures from a stick-through sensor that Eleanor drilled a hole in the grilltop to accept. Then she decided to test it out with a new rack of ribs- and one of her friends from work was quickly added to the party.
Yesterday afternoon, after firing it up, the needle got up into the BBQ range, but then would go no higher even as the grill was clearly getting hotter. She resolved to extrapolate the temperature from some other factors, plus we at least still had the probe to ensure the ribs themselves were properly heated inside.
Until we didn't. That thermometer also stopped displaying anything- and now it was within two hours of scheduled arrival time. So I headed back to Wegmans to replace the probe, and found the only close thing they had to an oven thermometer to measure the external temp. Trouble was, once we got it out of the package, it turned out it had a rubbery back and would’ve incinerated. I then ran off to Ed Young’s Hardware- the TARDIS of all home products- just as they were closing.
Any big box store would have sent me away. Their departing manager tried to. But I offered all my cash- a $20 bill- for this $5 part just to save our (not quite) bacon. Of course they let me in at 6:05. Of course an employee took me right to where the all-metal thermometers were. And of course they cashed me out at 6:10 and made change. They even offered me rewards points. No- they went way abover and beyonder already:) The ribs were yummy. The company was lovely. Amazon is getting their stupidass thingie back.